Katharine Lackey

Capturing the Wall Street crisis

In the past weeks it seems that we’ve been flooded with the inescapable images of Wall Street’s downfall as markets have plunged, and continued to do so despite the passing of a bailout bill.

What surprised me most, was the relative sameness of the photos being published, mostly through The Associated Press — seems some photographers are stalking the floor looking for downtrodden stock brokers… and they’ve found many examples.

Most photos seem to illustrate the feeling on Wall Street by finding stock brokers with their hands covering part or all of their faces.

Here’s a few from the last couple days:

AP Photo

AP Photo

AP Photo

AP Photo

It’s not that I’m against taking photos of stock brokers who are obviously not feeling great about Wall Street at the moment, it’s just that I’d like to see more photos published that focus on how regular people are dealing with the market … like this one:

AP Photo

I have a feeling the problem comes down to limited space for photos — if you can only publish one photo to illustrate the Wall Street crisis, most likely you will pick from the ones with stock brokers.

Speaking of multimedia reporting

For the last couple of weeks, my normally print only reporting class has focused on audio. A couple Mondays ago, we recorded a speech of Victoria Freile, a multimedia reporter for the Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y.

Here’s a segment of that speech where Freile discusses being a multimedia reporter and why multimedia is so important.

[audio http://intotheprism.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/victoria-freile-blog.mp3]

Still a print journalist at heart

(This post originally appeared on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists, a blog for young journalists.)

As journalism moves more and more in the direction of multimedia, I find myself torn. It’s not that I don’t like audio or video journalism, or that I’m not at least somewhat capable of producing such multimedia, it’s just that I enjoy traditional print journalism much more, even with what some call a limited capacity for story telling.

So, despite all my work to become a well-rounded multimedia and print journalist, I hope to work mainly as a print reporter in the future, perhaps capturing audio or video to go online for some stories, photos for others.

I enjoy weaving words and creating visual images for the reader’s mind. Whether it’s a story based on a 15-minute conversation or a two-hour-long interview, I try to find that uniqueness that makes a story a story and not just a string of words thrown together. When you move exclusively to audio and video — you lose the ability to shape what you’re reporting on, to tell a story in your own voice.

At the same time, I don’t believe that injecting a reporter into an audio or video production is an option, as that most times produces laughable results — especially with video (unless they know broadcast journalism well).

Audio and video do, however, have the ability to enhance a print story in its online form. In this day and age, no important event should be covered without the basic idea of putting audio soundslides with the story online. And I hope a future job lends me the ability to accomplish that when necessary.

Photos, in and of themselves, also have the ability to tell a story in a visual fashion that can be just as good, if not better, than print reporting alone. Add in audio or music and you get productions such as MediaStorm which tell stories from multiple angles that print journalism alone could not accomplish.

Overall, I think it’s important not to separate multimedia and print — or to have two distinct reporters for each of those categories. Instead, a more streamlined production could be made by having print reporters combine audio, video or photo slides to stories that lend themselves to that type of multimedia.

The focus, though, I hope will remain on the writing.